Ceremony on Building of a New Emone.
The usual occasion for the building of a new emone is an impending big feast, the then existing emone in the village being out of repair, or there being then no true emone in the village. But emone are built at other times also.
The actual building of the emone is carried out by the whole clan without ceremony; but when it is finished they erect tall slender straight-stemmed tree poles, passing through the roof of the emone, and to these they tie bunches of croton leaves. When the emone is being built in anticipation of a big feast, these poles are like, and in fact are part of the series of, the poles erected for the purpose of the feast, as above described. Croton leaves are also attached to poles after the repairing of a then existing emone.
In the case of a new emone, after its completion they light a fire in it, and in that fire cook a wild pig; vegetable food is provided, and the clan, including members of the village and of other villages, have a little clan feast of the vegetables, followed by a cutting up and distribution of the pig. But there is no dancing.
[1] It is the custom among the Kuni people when any woman (not merely the wife of a chief) has her first baby for the women of her own village, and probably of some neighbouring villages also, to assemble in the village and to attack her house and the village club-house with darts, which the women throw with their hands at the roofs. At Ido-ido I saw that the roofs of the club-house and of some of the ordinary houses had a number of these darts sticking into them. The darts were made out of twigs of trees, and were about five or six feet long; and each of them had a bunch of grass tied in a whorl at or near its head, and some of them had a similar bunch similarly tied at or near its middle. See also Dr. Seligmann’s reference (Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 298) to the Roro custom for warriors, when returning from a successful campaign, to throw their spears at the roof and sides of the marea. In Mekeo there is no corresponding ceremony on the birth of a first child; but men, women and children of the village collect by the house and sing all through the night; and in the morning the woman’s husband will kill a pig or dog for them, which they cook and eat without ceremony.
[2] Dr. Seligmann refers to this custom among the Roro people (Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 256), and there is no doubt that it exists among the Mekeo people also. Father Desnoes, of the Sacred Heart Mission, told me that in Mekeo, though the pig used to be given when the boy adopted his perineal band at the age of four, five, six, or seven, it is now generally given earlier. The pig is there regarded as the price paid for the child, and is called the child’s engifunga.
[3] Seligmann’s Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 67.
[4] Seligmann’s Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 71.
[5] Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 21.
[6] In Mekeo such a devolution of chieftainship is the occasion for a very large feast.
[7] This ceremony is different from the Mekeo ceremony on the elevation by a chief of his successor to a joint chieftainship, of which some particulars were given to me by Father Egedi; but there is an element of similarity to a Mekeo custom for the new chief, after the pigs have been killed and partly cut up by someone else, to cut the backs of the pigs in slices.